


Richie Tozier: 2 Interviews 20 Years Apart

by sophieexists



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Character Study, Interviews, M/M, also insane eddie representation is important. i’m here to give it to u, and also a brief eddie kaspbrak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:49:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophieexists/pseuds/sophieexists
Summary: A staple of Tozier’s comedy is his raunchiness. “I’m still, like, mentally 14 years old, and it’s probably a defense mechanism,” he says. He’s finished his coffee, but is still holding the cup, swinging it around as he talks. “And also my dick is huge.”Two interviews with 20 years in between
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 176





	Richie Tozier: 2 Interviews 20 Years Apart

**Author's Note:**

> brief warning 4 mention of stans suicide and also richie’s drug abuse

I last interviewed Richie Tozier about 20 years ago, in 1999. It didn’t go anywhere. 23 year old Tozier buzzes with unspent energy, even as we wait in line to get coffee. His shoes don’t match and his fingernails are bitten down. He compulsively pushes his hair out of his face and readjusts his glasses. 

“I’ve never really gotten interviewed before,” he says. “I mean, like, _really_ interviewed.” Despite his odd, loud demeanor and outfit, Tozier radiates a certain sort of charm. He speaks in sentence fragments half the time. Having lived in Los Angeles for almost five years, he’s been attempting to make it big since he first stepped off the plane. 

“I don’t really remember what I was like growing up, probably because of the shitton of drugs in my system from ages 15 and up, but I remember wanting to be, like, a ventriloquist,” he says. He pours seven of the artificial sugar packets into his sweet looking mocha. When pushed about his lapse in memory, he shrugs. “I don’t really know. I don’t even remember what my dad did for a living. Probably a mix of childhood trauma and experimenting with almost every single drug you could find in rural Maine.”

He cannot remember, even, the name of the specific part of rural Maine he grew up in. “I just remember being alone a lot. It was the late eighties, early nineties, right? So, like, children could just roam the streets.”

After graduating in 1993, he moved straight to California, starting with small sets wherever he could find. In his more recent sets, he details what it’s like to be high and trying to get home safe in the middle of the night. “I’m very lucky to be a man, stumbling around LA, trying to find my tiny apartment filled with, like, half eaten pizza crusts and weed crumbs,” he recounts, walking around the small stage. “Because even though the kidnapper would probably be, like, _Jesus, we can’t let that guy go home to that again,_ I don’t even have to worry about some big dude overtaking me in the parking lot of the shitty bar I go to. He _would_ overtake me, though, I know that for a fucking fact. And I’m alright with that!”

While Tozier is tall, he insists he could, “easily be overtaken. I am literally, like, the human equivalent to the spaghetti that’s too big for the pot so you snap it in half.” Something kind of like a realization comes over his face. He grins. “That’s not the only thing about me that’s too big.”

A staple of Tozier’s comedy is his raunchiness. “I’m still, like, mentally 14 years old, and it’s probably a defense mechanism,” he says. He’s finished his coffee, but is still holding the cup, swinging it around as he talks. “And also my dick is huge.” 

Foulmouthed as he is, he is remarkably self aware. When I tell him this, he says, “the psychedelics I took a couple days ago expanded my mind. I mean, they fucked me up. It was a bad trip. I was like, holy shit, why the fuck is this clown standing in my room. Why are my friends' eyes turning into balloons. I’ve never had a good trip. It’s always the same shit.”

He sobers up, though, admitting, “I don’t know. I feel like a chunk of it is all missing, like, I know 23 year olds don’t have their shit together, in general. But I feel like I’m lacking somewhere—in social skills, sure, but that can probably be linked back to my diagnosable hyperactivity. But something else, too.” 

Tozier’s comedy isn’t exactly my taste, but even at 23, jittery and probably going into some sort of withdrawal (“This is the earliest I’ve woken up in weeks,” he confesses. “I usually wake up at four, smoke a blunt, and then try to book somewhere.”), he’s charismatic. When leaving, he insists he pays for my drink. When I remind him that I already paid upfront in the beginning, he shakes his head. “No, man,” he says. “Just, like, take the five dollars. Seriously.” 

My last question for him was this: what do you want to say to yourself 20 years from now?

Halfway out the coffee shop door, he laughs. “He better not be fucking boring.”

Now, forty years old, we sit in the same coffee shop. “It’s crazy how this place hasn’t, like, closed down. And also how I haven’t died in the last twenty years. Absolutely insane,” he says. He dresses much the same, this time with matched shoes. He still talks with his hands, though, while 23 year old Tozier was largely unknown, he is now a self described “D-List comedian known for a public mental break.”

“A lot has changed in 20 years, man,” he says. “I mean, now I’m known for fucking up, which is, like, not totally ideal. I stopped and then started writing my own shit in that time, too.”

The mental break he’s referring to is his famous show where he forgot his own name and ran off stage, disappearing for a month and a half. 

“Some deeply unsettling stuff happened that month,” he says. “Connected with some childhood friends.”

The childhood friends are novelist William Denbrough, fashion designer Beverly Marsh, and 2014’s Sexiest Man Alive, architect Ben Hanscom, travel blogger Mike Hanlon (@m-hanlon on Instagram) and Tozier’s boyfriend, Eddie, whose surname is private. 

“One of my friends, I found out, had killed himself right before the show,” Tozier says, playing with the sugar packets. “I got more bad news than that, too. And I handled it like a champ, going on stage and forgetting everything, including my own name.”

When I ask him about his memory loss 20 years ago, he laughs. “Yeah, totally a mix of trauma and the ketamine I was high on in my twenties. My father was a dentist.”

Tozier and his friends grew up in Derry, Maine, now notorious for the amount of children that went missing there every year, as well as breeding serial killer Henry Bowers. 

“Bowers used to bully me in middle school! He called me a flamer! And he was right!”

Tozier came out in 2017, via a series of tweets. Two of them read, “hello u all i am sadly very alive + gay + also i haven’t written my own shit in maybe 8 years much love” and “no this is not a joke i like sucking dick.” His jokes about his fake girlfriend are replaced with jokes about his real boyfriend. 

“Oh my god, I know I’m weird, but Eddie is even fucking weirder,” he says, in his special released on Netflix last month, called _Richie Tozier: Clown Nation_ . “He sleeps over the covers, like an actually insane person, and he takes a run every day, listening to a podcast about the murder town _we grew up in._ And he gets very angry when I bring up the fact that we literally experienced everything that they’re talking about.”

The infamous Derry podcast, run by Phillipa Bentley, details the gruesome murders that took place in the small town. When Tozier and his friends were growing up there, many children went missing, such as Eddie Corcoran and Bette Ripsom. 

Derry started out as a beaver camp until 91 people went missing, starting a long history of bloodshed. In 1864, only 11 people out of 120 survived a shooting by a gang run by confederate sympathizers, who, in 1900 killed five more people. 

The small town with under 2,000 residents is known for its bigotry, with the Black Spot being burned down by a cult, and in 2016, Adrian Mellon was the victim of a homophobic hate crime on Derry’s most famous bridge. 

“It’s fucking terrifying there,” Tozier says. “Mike [Hanlon] knows more about it than me, but it was terrifying. Like, everywhere else it was the 80’s, and in Derry it was 1919 and women still aren’t able to vote.”

While the town may have been a traumatic place to grow up, Tozier says that he formed a lifelong bond, in a group that called themselves the Loser’s Club. 

In _Clown Nation_ , he recounts a story wherein he sets a young Eddie’s broken elbow, and William Denbrough punches him in the face. He says they all reconnected because of “something having to do with aliens and also Mike Hanlon” but hasn’t given much information past that and a brief mention of his friends suicide. 

“I can’t really talk about that friend much,” he says. “It was his life, and I wasn’t really in touch with him at the time. We were like brothers when we were kids, though. He really liked birds.”

Among his stories of his childhood, his boyfriend, and his life as a “clown and fraud, wrapped into one,” he mentions how his history of addiction shaped the rumors during his hiatus. “Everyone was like, _RICHIE TOZIER: ON COKE?_ And they weren’t too far off, actually.”

Tozier has started to be more open about the downside of his use of drugs, particularly in his 20s. He says it’s a new thing, even though he would joke about being high all the time in the 90s and early 2000s, he never really delved into the aspect of his addictions. “I was just trying to remember, or figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. I just needed psychiatry and to, like, relive the worst bits of my life.” 

“I’ve always had an addictive personality. Shit, I started smoking with Bev [Marsh] when we were 14.”

His life has improved since then, the loneliness he felt 20 years ago no longer running his mind. “It’s so weird to have friends again,” he says. “Like, I didn’t really have that or any relationship during my adult years.”

His relationship seems to be one of the things that bring him the greatest amount of joy. 

“Eddie’s fucking neurotic, I love him so much,” he says, drinking his coffee. It’s black this time. The two of them met as young kids, growing up together until they drifted apart when they went to college on different sides of the country. “God, I was in love with him when I was, like, 14, and I didn’t even know what to do with it, I looked at this batshit 4’11 kid and thought, _you are wearing two fanny packs and yelling at me and I love you_.” 

Eddie, by Tozier’s account, works a painfully boring desk job. “It’s all insurance shit, I don’t even know what he does.” 

He describes his boyfriend as “an angry fucker, ever since he was a kid, and I was the one with a punk phase.” Despite his anger, Eddie remains kind. “I remember this one time, like a couple months ago, this kid crashed her skateboard, and Spaghetti [one of his many nicknames] whipped out the neosporin and waited until she stopped crying to leave. He gave her, like, 20 dollars too.” He smiles fondly. “Wonder how she’s doing.”

“The two of us are good together, I think,” he says. “I mean, all sev-six of us were so fucking miserable before we became friends. I think Eddie and I balance each other out.” 

I ask him how he’s changed over the course of the last 20 years. “I think that, even though 2016 sucked—well every year before that sucked, too, I guess, I’m healthier now. Happier. Got my friends back, replaced my misogynistic thing with my gay thing. It’s weird, because I owe basically all my success to a team of writers. But I don’t know if I would do it over again if I could.” He pauses. “Fuck that, actually. Of course I would do it over again.”

Tozier looks up from the table he was staring at, and his face brightens. “Eds!” he calls. “Hello! Eddie my love!”

A short man in what appears to be a suit from Beverly Marsh’s fall line, _New Kid,_ walks over to the table. He has a scar on his cheek and walks like he’s running late. He appears to be holding back laughter. When he reaches us, he puts a hand on Tozier’s shoulder. 

“Hey, Rich,” he says, and then turns to me. “He’s a fucking dork, right?”

Tozier laughs and covers Eddie’s hand with his own. 

I have one last question for the infamous Richie Tozier: what do you want to say to your 23 year old self?

He looks at Eddie and smiles. “He should clean his fucking apartment,” he says. “And also, he should contact some boring dude in New York.”


End file.
